BLP 4099

Grant Green - Sunday Mornin'

Released - October 1962

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, June 4, 1961
Kenny Drew, piano; Grant Green, guitar; Ben Tucker, bass; Ben Dixon, drums.

tk.3 Come Sunrise
tk.11 Freedom March
tk.17 Sunday Morning
tk.19 Exodus
tk.23 God Bless The Child
tk.26 So What

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Freedom March	Grant Green	04 June 1961
Sunday Mornin'	Grant Green	04 June 1961
Exodus	Ernest Gold	04 June 1961
Side Two
God Bless the Child	Arthur Herzog, Jr. Billie Holiday	04 June 1961
Come Sunrise	Grant Green	04 June 1961
So What	Miles Davis	04 June 1961

Liner Notes

IN the last couple of years, the guitar has been gradually returning to the position it once held in jazz groups. Even though Charlie Christian is considered one of the prime movers in the bop revolution, standing as a bridge between Lester Young and the contemporaries, it was, ironically enough, the advent of bop that led to the decline of the guitar. The reasons are simple enough. The Basie rhythm section had been firmly anchored to the inexorable four-to-the-bar swing of the great Freddie Greene, and with the rhythmic complexities of bop, the wildly soaring combos of the Forties would have been held down too far by that kind of playing. Therefore, the main function of the guitar in a band was taken away from it. There were few, if any, virtuosos to approach Christian, and so the guitar, as an instrument in a modern combo, lapsed into disuse.

But the music has changed again, and there have been two primary reasons for it. One is the type of small group announced by Art Blakey and Horace Silver, the return-to-the-roots movement that dominated all of jazz in the middle- and late-Fifties. Roots, of course, means the blues, and the guitar is the traditional instrument for the blues. And at the same time, in a more direct vein, there was the rise to popularity of the tenor-and-organ combos in the small clubs throughout the land. Again, the guitar, For the instrument, is a favorite partnership choice of organists.

Considering these factors, as well as the great current interest in such direct blues singer-guitarists as Lightnin' Hopkins, it is not at all surprising to find the guitar once more back on top of the heap.

Those partial to a times-make-the-man theory of history can look to those facts for some of the reasons for the sudden appearance and popularity of three widely dissimilar guitarists within the post few years: Charlie Byrd, Wes Montgomery, and Grant Green. Of the three, Green, whose album this is, comes most directly from conditions that are responsible for his success. His early experience was With local groups around his hometown of St. Louis, and one of the groups he worked with was led by a musician who has also benefited from the revival of interest in more basic music — tenor-man Jimmy Forrest.

But his recording career is due to another saxophone player, altoist Lou Donaldson, who heard him and brought him to the attention of Alfred Lion. It has always seemed to me that one of the things which makes Blue Note a valuable jazz company is precisely that such things as that happen.

By now, however, Green has gotten somewhat past the point where one can refer to him as new talent. He has gone through the traditional stages of acceptance: first the musicians find out, then the critics, then the in-group hippies, and now, Grant Green is beginning to make himself known to the jazz public at-large.

The present set, Sunday Morning, is his Fourth album for Blue Note. It is, in a possibly significant way, a departure from the previous three. His initial collection, appropriately titled Grant's First Stand (Blue Note 4064), was by a trio which included organist "Baby Face" Willette and drummer Ben Dixon, the same group which also made album under Willette's name called Stop and Listen (Blue Note 4084. The second album, Green Street (Blue Note 4071), a complete exposure of Green's talent, for he worked with only the assistance of bass and drums. For his third outing, Grandstand (Blue Note 4086), he added a Few of the many horns of Yusef Lateef, and used another organist, Jack McDuff. Once again, since it was an organ, there was no bass.

Now, with his fourth LP, he has chosen to record with a pianist, and appropriately enough, it is a pianist who, like the guitar, has also returned in forceful blues-based fashion to the scene after a period of comparative neglect. This is Kenny Drew, who has hewn to his own happy blues line through the vicissitudes of changing fashion, and whose number is beginning to come up again. Obviously, it is a different matter recording with a pianist than an organist, and since Drew is not so heavily chordal as an organ player is likely to be, in this set, particularly with Green's almost exclusively single-lined approach ("I don't like to get hung up with the piano or organ player with a lot of chord clusters," he has said. "It gets cluttered"), has a wonderfully light, airy quality to it. This quality is assisted by Ben Dixon's unobtrusive drumming, and most particularly by Ben Tucker. The present set contains the most exciting work I have heard from Tucker, whose long strings of repeated notes inevitably bring to mind Wilbur Ware, and who makes, not only on his own solos but everywhere on the set, a propulsive and melodic contribution to the music that goes a long way toward making the album the success it is.

Then, there is the selection of the music itself. Three of the six tunes are by Green himself "Freedom March" is a blues with, as its title suggests, the added march-like flavor that is now often infused into the form. "Sunday Mornin'" is, of course, influenced by gospels, but unlike many of the angry hard-times-and-chains pieces that have resulted from this influence, this has the happy, shouting quality of rural church music. "Come Sunrise" also acknowledges its debt in the title, this time to a standard which has long been a favorite of iazzmen. But unlike the typical new-line-over-old-changes approach, this is a variant on the melody itself.

Just as Green displays various facets of his background in his own compositions, he does the same with the other material he has chosen. "Exodus" is the theme from a recent Hollywood blockbuster that became highly successful in one jazz version, and has become a favorite with others because of the minor feel that fits in so well With much of what is being played today. "God Bless the Child" means Billie Holiday, and her song, treated here with tender respect, has the same quality of brooding lament possessed by some of her greatest performances. And finally, there is Miles Davis's "So What," one of the modal pieces by the trumpeter that have been so enormously influential. Green here completely reverses the emphasis of the original recording, on which the line played by guitar was carried on the bass, and the answering statements were played by the horns. The horns, naturally, had more impact, but here, since Green is the major soloist, the emphasis is on his portion.

All six of these greatly varied pieces contain further evidence of Grant Green's stature in the vanguard of the new wave of jazz guitar, and show, by that variation, that he has not yet begun to exhaust the musical possibilities of his instrument.

— JOE GOLDBERG

Photo by FRANCIS WOLFF
Cover Design by REID MILES
Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT SUNDAY MORNING

Ensemble variety was a hallmark of Grant Green's initial tenure at Blue Note (1961—65), as Joe Goldberg emphasizes in his original liner notes. In the four years after Sunday Morning was recorded, producer Alfred Lion found even more combinations in which to feature the guitarist through the alternation of piano and organ in Green's studio rhythm sections, plus the addition of one or more horns, vibes, and/or Afro-Latin percussion.

An overview of these sessions reveals a curious fact: that the guitar/piano/bass/drums format heard here was the most frequently employed setting for Green, yet at the time, the least heard. After cutting Sunday Morning, Green taped three quartet dates with Sonny Clark on piano, one with Herbie Hancock (two if we count Feelin' the Spirit, where Garvin Masseaux's tambourine is a rather unobtrusive fifth voice), and one with McCoy Tyner in the next three years. With the exception of Feelin' the Spirit, all were kept out of circulation while other dates with other ensembles were issued, and all save Goin' West (with Hancock) languished in the vaults for over a decade and first saw the light of day in Japan. It appears that, despite Green's obvious comfort in the soloist-plus-acoustic-rhythm setting, and the quality of both the music and his associates on the subsequent projects, Lion and Frank Wolff felt that other configurations held greater commercial potential. Even the present album, recorded two months before Grantstand, did not appear until after the latter had been released.

All the more reason to celebrate Sunday Morning, which is one of Green's best albums and a personal favorite. ["Come Sunrise" was the theme song of the author's college radio show.] The album is an inspired blend of personnel and material, with less star power perhaps than the guitarist's other quartet efforts with pianists but just as much quality in the resulting music. The rhythm section brings together two familiar associates, Ben Dixon and Ben Tucker (each of whom had previously recorded with Green), plus Kenny Drew. Blue Note had given Drew his first recording exposure as both a sideman (with Howard McGhee in 1950) and a leader (in '53). The peripatetic pianist, who was based on the West Coast and in Florida at various points during the '50s, had returned to the label in support of John Coltrane for Blue Train (1957), and for more extensive recording in 1960—61, when he supported Jackie McLean, Tina Brooks, Kenny Dorham, Dexter Gordon, and Green, and cut his own Undercurrent. While some discographies list an August '61 Jazzline date with vibist Hagood Hardy, the present album appears to be Drew's last issued U.S. recording prior to his European expatriation.

As for the music, Green showed great prescience in his choice of cover tunes. There had been surprisingly few instrumental versions of "God Bless the Child" recorded by 1961. (Coincidentally, a version had been taped two months earlier by Eddie Harris, the musician to whom Goldberg alludes in his reference to the popular jazz version of the theme from the film Exodus.) Billie Holiday's classic ballad turned out to be made for the guitar, as is confirmed by both Harris's recording (with Joe Diorio) and Sonny Rollins's version of a few months later (with Jim Hall). Ditto for "So What," which Barney Kessel had covered on a Poll Winners album prior to Green's interpretation. As he would later on other recordings of material associated with jazz giants ("My Favorite Things," "Oleo"), Green alters the theme statement of "So What" and effectively personalizes the material.

The originals are all blues-related (the title track) or straight blues, yet retain distinctive characters. "Come Sunrise," as Goldberg points out, is a blues variation of the melody from Jerome Kern's "Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise"; "Freedom March" strikes an ambulatory groove without laying the martial cadences on too thickly; and "Sunday Mornin'" takes a similar understated approach to a gospel waltz beat. Timing limitations dictated that one of the session's seven tunes be eliminated from the original LP release, and it is possible that "Tracin' Tracey" (another blues) was shelved as much for its thematic similarity to Horace Silver's "Come on Home" as for any qualitative shortcomings.

— Bob Blumenthal, 2005